Silvermont

Intel Mobile Celeron N2830
General information
Launched	From 2013
Common manufacturer	Intel
Architecture and classification
Technology node	22 nm
Instructions	x86-16,IA-32,x86-64
Extensions	MMX,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,SSSE3,SSE4,SSE4.1,SSE4.2 AES-NI,RDRAND,CLMUL VT-x
Physical specifications
Cores	2–8
Products, models, variants
Brand names	Atom Celeron Pentium
History
Predecessors	Bonnell Saltwell
Successors	Airmont (die shrink), Goldmont (new microarchitecture)

Silvermont is amicroarchitecture for low-powerAtom,Celeron andPentium branded processors used insystems on a chip (SoCs) made byIntel. Silvermont forms the basis for a total of four SoC families:^[1]

• Merrifield andMoorefield  – consumer SoCs intended forsmartphones
• Bay Trail – consumer SoCs aimed attablets,hybrid devices,netbooks,nettops, andembedded/automotive systems
• Avoton – SoCs for micro-servers and storage devices
• Rangeley – SoCs targeting network and communication infrastructure.

Silvermont is the successor of theBonnell, using a newer22 nm process (previously introduced withIvy Bridge) and a newmicroarchitecture, replacingHyper Threading without-of-order execution.^[2]

Silvermont was announced to news media on May 6, 2013, at Intel's headquarters at Santa Clara, California.^[3] Intel had repeatedly said the first Bay Trail devices would be available during the Holiday 2013 timeframe, while leaked slides showed that the release window for Bay Trail-T as August 28 – September 13, 2013.^[4] Both Avoton and Rangeley were announced as being available in the second half of 2013. The first Merrifield devices were announced in 1H14.^[5]

According to theTick–tock modelAirmont is the14 nmdie shrink of Silvermont, launched in early 2015 and first seen in theAtom x7-Z8700 as used in theMicrosoft Surface 3.^[6] Airmont microarchitecture includes the following SoC families:^[7]

• Braswell  – consumer SoCs aimed at PCs
• Cherry Trail  – consumer SoCs aimed at tablets.

Silvermont based cores have also been used, modified, in theKnight's Landing iteration of Intel'sXeon Phi HPC chips.

Silvermont was the firstAtom processor to feature anout-of-order architecture.^[8]

• A22 nm manufacturing process based on 3Dtri-gate transistors
• System on chip architecture
• Consumer chips up to quad-core, business-class chips up to eight cores
• SupportsSSE4.2 instruction set
• Gen 7Intel HD Graphics withDirectX 11,OpenGL 4.0, andOpenCL 1.1 support. OpenGL 4.0 is supported with 10.18.10.5161 WHQL^[9][10] and later drivers. OnAndroid, Silvermont graphics isOpenGL ES 3.1 certified.^[11]
• 10 WTDP desktop processors
• 4.5 and 7.5 W TDP mobile processors
• 20 W TDP Server and Communications processors

Intel revealed in its Q4 2016quarterly report that there were quality issues in the C2000 product family, which had an effect on the financial performance of the company's Data Center Group that quarter.^[12] Anerratum named AVR54 published by Intel; state there is a defect in the chip'sLPC clock, and affected systems "may experience inability to boot or may cease operation".^[13][14][15] A workaround is available requiring platform hardware changes. The SoC failures are thought to have led to failures inCisco andSynology products,^[16] though discussion of the C2000 as the root cause of failure has been reported to be under anon-disclosure agreement for many vendors.^[17]

Intel released a new C0 stepping of the C2000 series in April 2017 which corrected the bug.^[18]

In July 2017 Intel published that a similar quality issue affects also Atom E3800 series embedded processors. The erratum named VLI89 published by Intel state, similar to issue with Atom C2000, that there is a defect in the chip's LPC clock and affected systems "may experience inability to boot or may cease operation".^[19] Issues extend also to USB bus and SD card circuitry and should happen "under certain conditions where activity is high for several years". In April 2018 Intel announced it is releasing a new D1 stepping to fix the issue.^[20]

The LPC, USB and SD Card buses circuitry degradation issues also apply to other Bay Trail processors such as Intel Celeron J1900 and N2800/N2900 series;^[21] also to Pentium N3500, J2850, J2900 series; and Celeron J1800 and J1750 series—as those are based on the same affected silicon.

Cisco stated failures of Atom C2000 processors can occur as early as 18 months of use with higher failure rates occurring after 36 months.^[22]

Mitigations were found to limit impact on systems. Firmware update for the LPC bus called LPC_CLKRUN# reduces the utilization of the LPC interface what in turn decreases (but not eliminates) LPC bus degradation - some systems are however not compatible with this new firmware. USB should have a maximum of 10% active time and there is a 50TB transmit traffic life expectancy over the lifetime of the port. It is recommended not to use SD card as a boot device and to remove the card from the system when not in use.

It has been widely reported that Bay Trail CPUs (and possibly their derivatives including Airmont/Braswell/Cherry Trail) experience random freezes / lock-ups on various Linux kernels. Reference Linuxbug report 109051 onKernel.orgBugzilla, first reported Dec-2015. Workaround seems to be setting the Linux kernel flagintel_idle.max_cstate=1, which while eliminating the system freezes/lock-ups, results in increased CPU power/battery usage by preventing the CPU from entering higher power-savingC-states. Systems running Windows-OSes apparently do not experience these lockup/freeze issues. The issue had been addressed in the commit"drm/i915: Disable preemption and sleeping while using the punit sideband".

A potential fix is to sethw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C1 anddev.cpu.<n>.lowest via/etc/sysctl.conf.

14 nm Airmont architecture processors are also affected by the design flaws as noted in the Braswell Specification Update under CHP49 errata.^[23] In addition to LPC and SD Card circuitry degradation issues those 14 nm designs also have issues with Real Time Clock (RTC) circuitry degradation, their USB buses are however not affected. Unspecified firmware changes are required to mitigate RTC circuitry degradation. Intel does not plan to release a new stepping for Braswell. Intel admitted the issue stating the impact on consumers depends on use condition.^[24]

List of desktop processors as follows:

It has been found that a bug in the blueprint of the C2000 CPUs family may cause failure of its embedded Ethernet ports.^{[citation needed]}

List of server processors as follows:^[25]

List of communications processors as follows:^[26]

List of embedded processors as follows:^[27]

List of mobile processors as follows:

List of tablet and hybrid processors as follows:

List of smartphone processors as follows:

List of smartphone processors as follows:

List of desktop processors as follows:

List of mobile processors as follows:

List of smartphone and tablet processors as follows:

Silvermont based processor cores have been used inKnights Landing versions of Intel'sXeon Phi multiprocessor HPC chips, with changes for HPC includingAVX-512 vector units.^[29][30]

Intel also licensed Airmont CPU cores to Spreadtrum (nowUNISOC) for use with two of its SoCs launched in 2017: SC9861G-IA^[31] and SC9853l.^[32]

• List of Intel CPU microarchitectures
• List of Intel Pentium microprocessors
• List of Intel Celeron microprocessors
• List of Intel Atom microprocessors
• Atom (system on chip)

• Intel x86 microprocessors
• Intel microarchitectures
• X86 microarchitectures
• Computer-related introductions in 2013

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• Articles with unsourced statements from May 2017